Andrew's Blog

Back in May, we went to the Mushroom Festival in Boyne City, east of Traverse City in the northern part of the state. This place is famous for morel mushrooms which are considered a delicacy and known to have more flavor than normal white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) commonly found in the grocery store.

People in Illinois and Michigan go on mushroom hunts to find morels and are very secretive about their location. We tried to eat some for lunch, but because this years season was not very good, they did not have any to serve. In fact, we attempted to have lunch a the local hotel at 12 noon, but after enquiring about whether the mushrooms were on the menu, they said that there were closed for lunch and shooed us out of the restaurant. Highly suspect don't you think?

Anyway, we went to check out the tents and found some dried morels from Illinois which we bought to take home and cook to find out what the big deal was about.

We finally got around to eating the morels with steak, cooking the steak on the BBQ and the mushrooms in a pan with butter. As you can see, the mushrooms look like coral, are hollow on the inside, and look spongy.


Morel Mushrooms

Conclusion? Give me Chinese mushrooms any day. The morels do have a stronger flavor than white mushrooms, but are nothing to really get excited about compared to Chinese mushrooms. We have some left, so will try cooking them in a different way to get more familiar with the taste and may change our minds about them.


Boyne Mushroom Festival

Boyne is a ski resort town during the winter (the mountain is all of 350 m in height) and has a nice bay at the edge of the town. They hung these morel mushrooms on a pole so you can see what they look like.